Hi i have 100 m4a songs and they crash my Zen player. So i decided to encode them to mp3

So first i made wav's from them with winamp. Then i use lame 398 for the encoding tot mp3.

This is the setting i am using right now. But the problem is that it only encodes the first wav file in the dir and leaves the other 99 alone.

lame *.wav --preset fast standard -V1

I cant see what is wrong with this setting what do i miss?

Thanks.

for %i in (*.wav) do lame "%i" --preset fast standard -V1

EDIT to add: Your idea is terrible, and your commandline parameters are dumb. Follow recommended LAME settings, and don't transcode.

First, you should use either --preset fast standard (equal to -V2) or -V1 but not both.

Second, try the following commandline:

for %a in (*.wav) do lame -V2 "%a" "%~na.mp3"

I think you misunderstood me.

The original are m4a files, cant play them so i have to convert them to mp3

The best way i could think of is to convert them to wav (no loss) en from wav to mp3. Dont know a better way (less loss), if you know a better way let me know.

Thanks for the loop command i will try it.

What's the other option here?

Cheers,
David.

Hi thanks you. But i have used this command until a year ago with good result. I believe it was the same as the --preset fast standard (v2) but with more bits (v1) for better audio. I have tested lots of settings these day's. Am i that wrong?

With lame 3.98 all you need is -V 1. The --preset fast standard is superfluous.

If you must transcode, use Foobar to transcode directly to MP3. There is no need to convert them to WAV first.

Bad idea to transcode from m4a to mp3, you will loose more quality. Converting them to wav will make no difference the m4a encoding already took all the information it had 2 and you won't get it back by converting it to wav (Inside it will still be the raw PCM info of an m4a).

If you have to convert, convert directly if on windows use Foobar, if on mac use XLD. But i would recommend depending where you got the m4a files to try to get the original music from disc or any lossless input, and convert it to mp3 then, that way you get a superior sound file. It takes a few more steps but the outcome is much better.

Does the Zen not work with m4a in general or not with these m4a files?

Its some kind of podcast, 1 hour mixes of dance music. No way to get the original.


I know the info has already has been lost and is not coming back. But i used a few m4a to mp3 converters and they sounded bad. Thats why i did it myself in 2 steps, havent tried foobar before, but the conversion is done.

Dont know. Havent tried the before.
They load, they play until i shut the zen down for more then 2 hours. Then after starting a freeze. reset, freeze again. Other song freeze, etc.
Theb i let iTunus make aac's of them, zen should play aac. some story so i go the mp3 way.

As said already, you needn't to decode to WAV separately; any program that converts between two lossy formats must do so (in the background) anyway.



Presets have been redundant/deprecated in LAME for a while. V1 and V2 are distinct settings, which can't be 'mixed', so you'll have to choose which you want based on bitrate/transparency. I'm fairly certain a check of your files (with Encspot or similar) will show that only one setting is applied, but I'm not sure which would be prioritised in this case.

True but al the programs i used didn't let me choose the mp3 encoder or it's settings. That why i went this 2 step way, so i could encode in the best quality.

Try foobar2000.
And, your setting (--preset fast standard -V1) is equal to plain -V1.

You could use Multi Frontend. (You’ll have to stop by http://www.rarewares.org/ to pick up MPAdec, and pop it and LAME in the folder you install Multi Frontend in.)

I'd suggest to use the out_lame plugin for WinAmp

http://out-lame.sourceforge.net/

it can easily be updated with lame 3.98.2 and will automatically generate proper ID3 tags as well

Cheers,
Maggi